I Want Justice, Too: Brother Wants Mississippi Cold Case Murders Re-opened | Jackson Free Press | Jackson, MS

I Want Justice, Too: Brother Wants Mississippi Cold Case Murders Re-opened

Charles Evers, right, interviews Thomas Moore, left, on his radio station in Jackson, Miss., on July 13, 2005, during a journey back to Mississippi to seek justice for the Ku Klux Klan murders in 1964 of his younger brother, Charles Moore, and his friend, Henry Dee.  James Ford Seale died in prison after the journey, accompanied by the Jackson Free Press, inspired a federal trial. Evers is the brother of slain civil-rights leader Medgar Evers. Photo by Kate Medley

Charles Evers, right, interviews Thomas Moore, left, on his radio station in Jackson, Miss., on July 13, 2005, during a journey back to Mississippi to seek justice for the Ku Klux Klan murders in 1964 of his younger brother, Charles Moore, and his friend, Henry Dee. James Ford Seale died in prison after the journey, accompanied by the Jackson Free Press, inspired a federal trial. Evers is the brother of slain civil-rights leader Medgar Evers. Photo by Kate Medley

The Jackson Free Press teamed with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. to follow an Army vet and Mississippi native on his journey back home, looking for justice for his little brother who was killed by the Klan in 1964. This is his story—and it helped send James Ford Seale to prison.

Charles Moore hitchhiked often. Growing up in the 1950s and '60s in rural Southwest Mississippi, near the lethargic town of Meadville, the young black man had not enjoyed the amenities that many white teenagers had. His mama, Mazie, had never owned a car. They did not have running water, indoor plumbing, electricity, gas, a TV; they lived in a three-room shotgun house out in Franklin County, about 32 miles east of Natchez, where he shared a room with his brother, Thomas, one year older. You could see the daylight through the wooden slats.

Mazie slept in the other room and spent much of her free time in the tiny, damp kitchen, cooking biscuits and fatback, butterbeans, fried chicken and her famous potato salad. The boys picked blackberries and huckleberries for her jellies; they had hogs and chickens for meat and eggs. She would make a big batch of pickled pork sausages at one time; her boys dug them out of a big Mason jar with their fingers. The mother may have bought many of their groceries on her $20 credit account at Hollinger Grocery Store, but she always put three meals a day, home-cooked, on their small table for her boys.

Most days, Tom and Nub, as most everybody called Charles, took biscuits and fatback in greasy paper bags for lunch, first at the small black school in Meadville, which didn't have running water, either, and after 1963 at the Lillie May Bryant School, which was the consolidated black school for all of Franklin County. There they sat together most days and ate their biscuits.

"You seeing one, you seeing two," Thomas Moore says now. "We were poor, but we had everything we needed." He remembers his mother buying each of them five pairs of pants each school year, a few shirts and a new pair of shoes. "It was up to us to keep them clean." Nub, the neater one of the two, did a better job, pressing his clothes with a smoothing iron heated by the fire, polishing his shoes. It paid off—he was voted Best Dressed, as well as Most Intelligent, of his senior class. He was also president of his freshman, sophomore and senior classes (defeating Thomas for the post in the 12th grade; his big brother, in the same grade, became his vice president).

Mazie had a strong work ethic. People had thought her husband, Charlie, had lots of money; he had, after all, graduated high school and then worked as a logger. But he also had a gambling problem. When he died on March 27, 1948, at age 50, he didn't leave the family much to live on; they had to rely on welfare—$12 a month—and the $10 a month she made cleaning the house of the local welfare director, a white man. She also took in white folks' laundry that she and the boys would scrub in iron wash pots filled with scalding hot water.

But, somehow, it was enough. "We had a good Christmas always," Thomas says. "We'd each get six apples, six oranges, a paper-cap pistol. During the county fair, we'd get $5 for the whole week." To get to work or to visit their cousins and friends in nearby Bude, or to go to Natchez, the brothers would hitch rides, mostly from white folks who could afford cars.

Mazie made about $300 a year, but it was supplemented by money her two sons brought in plowing gardens for their Uncle Joe Buckles (bringing him $75 to $100 a day for five to 10 fields, then taking home about $2.50 each) and moving sand for the new golf course for whites in Franklin County.

They believed in working hard so they could have more someday; both boys dreamed of building their mama a brick house with running water and electric lights. Her goal was to send them both to college so they could have their piece of the American dream.

"She taught us how to be somebody," Thomas says of his mother, who only completed the sixth grade. "She taught us our ABCs and multiplication tables before we went to school. She was proud of her two boys."

MY BROTHER'S KEEPER
When we first meet Thomas, he is standing in the spot where his brother was last seen alive by anyone but Klansmen. It is July 8, 2005, and large, but sporadic raindrops are starting to drop on Main Street in Meadville as Hurricane Dennis starts to threaten the Gulf Coast. The street is peaceful on a Friday afternoon, except for the thunder claps that sound like gunshots.

"This is where we always hitchhiked from,"says Thomas, now a hulking, muscular man of 62, who has lived in Colorado Springs with his wife, Mae, and son, Jeffrey, since he retired from the Army in 1994 after 30 years of service. We are standing across Main from Napa Auto Supply, in front of the old Dillon's service station.

Thomas says that, in those days, hitchhiking wasn't considered scary; they had to do it to get around. But they did have a plan in case something went wrong: one would sit in the back seat, the other in the front. If a ride turned dangerous, one could grab the steering wheel, the other could choke the driver from behind. Or, if they were riding in the back of a pick-up truck, they planned to jump out into water as they went over a bridge.

The boys didn't have this plan because they sensed real danger from local whites, however. They hadn't even really heard about the Civil Rights Movement. They had to eat at the back of the Meadville Café, sit upstairs in the movie theater. Their people couldn't vote, and they studied from a history book with a rebel flag on the cover. But segregation was what they grew up knowing. "All our political knowledge was very limited. We didn't have TV; we didn't even get the Natchez Democrat," Thomas says.

Her sons didn't fear white men, but Mazie always knew there could be trouble. They may not have heard about Freedom Rides, but all mothers of black boys knew about the Emmett Till case up in Money, Miss., in 1955 where a Chicago mama lost her 14-year-old boy after he supposedly whistled at a white man's wife.

"Don't you be out there messing around with them white women," Mazie would tell Tom and Nub.

"She had a protective mentality," Thomas remembers.

So did Thomas. Because Nub was more studious and a bit smaller, the older brother always watched out for the young one. "Charles Moore would have made a Ph.D," he says. "I was the fighter; I protected him at school."

The boys liked it that way. They both played football at Lillie Bryant; Tom intentionally flunked out a year, he says now, in order to play football long enough to try to get a college scholarship. That meant that the brothers went to senior year together.

But, as no scholarship was in the offing, Tom decided to wait a year to go to college, and work in New Orleans instead, so that Nub could go ahead and to go Alcorn State, up in Lorman.

On his application, Charles said he wanted to be a schoolteacher: "I like helping people to learn," he typed.

He had recently read Margaret Walker Alexander's "For My People," Charles Darwin's "Origin of a Species" and John F. Kennedy's "Profiles in Courage." The latter was his favorite: "It had so much to do with the struggle of an individual in his development, and struggle impressed me greatly," he wrote on his application.

So in the fall of 1963, Nub went to Alcorn—and, very shortly thereafter, Tom was drafted into the Army and reported to Fort Polk in Louisiana for training.

CONDUCT UNBECOMING
At Alcorn, Charles' grades were erratic—the first year, his transcript shows, he made a B in zoology and an F in algebra. He was enjoying his new social life—and learning to speak up for himself in the world. He had an A in "student adjustment."

His second semester there, though, he spoke too loudly. After Charles joined a student protest about the poor quality of the cafeteria food, Alcorn President J.D. Boyd suspended him for "conduct on the campus unbecoming a student." By all accounts, that was his only brush ever with politics.

Charles went back home and seemed to go a bit adrift, coming back to eat home cooking and hang out with his cousins in Bude. The night of May 1, 1964, he told Mazie he was going over there with cousin Evis Bell to a party. He planned to stay the night at Evis' house.

The next day, Mazie passed the hitching spot in front of Dillon's gas station—the spot across from today's Napa Auto—and saw Charles trying to thumb. He was there with fellow Lillie Bryant alum Henry Dee, a dapper 19-year-old with a James-Brown-esque conk, who had moved to Chicago and was back home visiting.

Mazie had gotten a ride to the doctor and figured she would pick them up when she came back by there. That Saturday was the last time Mazie saw her boy alive.

Fellow Klansmen would later tell the FBI that when James Ford Seale, a 29-year-old truck driver from Meadville, drove by in his Volkswagen and saw the two boys, he got in his head that they were "part of the agitation that was going on in Mississippi, especially since one of them had recently come down from Chicago." He told the man driving with him, reportedly Charles Marcus Edwards, who worked at International Paper in Natchez, to get out of the car and follow him in his pick-up; he went back to the boys, who did not thumb him for a ride. He pulled over anyway and told them to get into the car, that he was a Federal Revenue agent. As he started driving west on Highway 84, toward Natchez, the boys became suspicious, and one asked him to pull over.

"(The boy) was told by James Seale that he could not as there were some more agents that he wanted the two Negroes to talk to," a Klansman later told the FBI. Seale reportedly used his walkie-talkie, official like, to call the men in the pickup truck to tell them he had two Negroes he wanted them to talk to. He then turned off 84 into the Homochitto National Forest. When he stopped, Charles and Henry got out just as the pickup pulled up. Seale got out with his carbine in his hand "and got the drop on the two Negroes."

The Klansmen—all members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, very active in and around Natchez then—tied the two boys to a tree and began severely beating them both with bean sticks.

After meeting Thomas Moore in Meadville, we drive the route the VW would have followed to take his brother and his friend into Homochitto. FBI records do not show exactly where the boys were taken, so we pick a spot in the woods thick with oaks, pines and low dead bushes recently burned. The raindrops, few and far between, seem as big as quarters. The cicadas are providing a dramatic soundtrack.

After we park, Thomas walks ahead of us, carrying a long, thin tree limb with four stems of leaves shooting off one end. It's probably 7 feet long. At first, I think he's carrying it as a walking stick, but then he walks up to a tree.

"This is a stick similar to a bean stick, the same size. People used bean sticks to stake beans, string beans, butterbeans, to stake tomatoes," Thomas Moore says. He starts swinging it like a baseball bat into the tree, with the force of all his 210 pounds.

Whack, whack, whack. The blows, which leave welts on the trunk of the Magnolia tree he picked, sound like a basketball thunking hard on a court. "These sticks had a lot of flexibility for beating someone tied to a tree," Thomas adds.

"Imagine a person, tied to a tree, a rope tied around their waist," he says between whacks. "They were trying to get them to confess to something that had no value." Whack. "They did confess to stop the bleeding." By now, all the leaves are gone, and the stick is at least a foot shorter.

As they unleashed all their strength on the boys, the Klansmen told Charles and Henry they knew they were Black Muslims trying to start an insurrection. They wanted to know who was leading the "Negro problems" in Franklin County. One of them finally told them the name of a black preacher in Roxie, to get them to stop.

When the Klansmen tired of swinging, the young men were hanging there by the waist, nearly lifeless, covered with blood. The Klansmen then had to decide what to do with them. According to FBI files, Seale's father Clyde, of Meadville, got to a telephone and called another son, Jack Seale, over in Natchez.

"KIWU!" Clyde said. The word "Kiwu" stands for "Klansman, I want you" in the KKK handbook.

Jack Seale reportedly responded to the cry for help by getting his buddy Ernest Parker, then a Natchez businessman, to bring his red Ford car to the forest and help load up the two men, who were nearly dead. They put Charles and Henry on a plastic tarp to keep bloodstains from getting into the trunk. They then drove some 100 miles to the Ole River—the Mississippi backwater near Tallulah, La., six miles from Vicksburg—to a boat landing belonging to Parker, according to FBI files.

There they took the men out into the water in a boat owned by Ernest Parker and his brother Lee, tied one of them to an old Jeep block and the other to a weighted chain, and pushed them overboard. They talked about shooting them first, being that they were still breathing, but "Seale replied that he did not want to shoot them because it would have gotten blood all over the boat," according to an FBI informant.

The bodies of Charles Moore and Henry Dee would not be found for over two months. As the families worried, rumor had it that they had run off somewhere. Meanwhile, in the white community, at least the white Klan community, word spread about the murders, with one tale being that Dee had "peeped" at Edwards' wife. The men involved started to get nervous because they worried that the bodies would float to the surface somehow. James Seale, in particular, told buddies that he was scared because he had put the tape on the men's wrists; he worried that his fingerprints would turn up, according to FBI reports.

On July 12 and 13, Navy divers looking for the bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner found the torsos of Charles and Henry; they were identified by personal effects including a belt buckle that Thomas Moore had given his brother.

ANYWHERE IN GLORY
It is dusk by the time we get to the cemetery back behind Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church where Charles Moore used to be a substitute Sunday School teacher. It is on a dirt road near Kirby, right off Seale Road N.W., across a cattle guard, encircled by a barb-wire fence. The rain has stopped, the sky is pinkish-gray, and the cicadas have followed us.

Thomas is quiet as he strides to the back right corner of the cemetery. He slows down as he approaches his family plot; his shoulders slump as he bends over graves that are starting to cave in a bit to look at his brother's tombstone. Its condition takes him back, and he seems surprised at an inscription he hasn't read in years. It is handwritten into a block of concrete, like a child scrawling their initials into a wet sidewalk. The word "born" is crumbling away:

Cherlie Eddie Moor
B Aug. 10, 1944
Beried July 1964
Darling, we will miss you
Anywhere in Glory Is All Right

It is the only time we will see Thomas seem embarrassed. "I got to get a new tombstone," he says, adding, "A local guy did this. He didn't spell his name right." The grave is surrounded by family names: Moore, Buckles, Cameron; his mother and father lie at the head of Charles' grave.

Standing under a huge oak tree, Thomas describes coming home from camp after his commander tells him that part of his brother's body has been found. Once he got here, no one would say anything about the murder. No one.

The body was interred at West Funeral Home in Natchez, the black one. The service was small with some community people, relatives, a few classmates. Mazie asked Thomas to wear his khaki Army uniform, and to walk in front of the casket as it was moved in and out of the church.

"It was sad," Thomas says. "Didn't nobody talk about the murder. The preacher didn't talk or say anything about the violent act, or anything like that."

That day began many years of sadness and pain for the Moore family. "When I walked out of this cemetery, that's when the anger started building," Thomas says. He remembers wanting to take his 30-30 Winchester, hunt down the Klansmen and exact revenge. But his mother told him no, that he needed to go make somebody out of himself instead. He would survive, she said.

Still, Thomas regrets the code of silence about the murders that developed between him and his mother and family members starting in July 1964. "People didn't talk about it at all. It was fear, shock; they didn't want to get involved maybe," he says. They also knew how unlikely it was to get justice for the murders of two black men by a gang of white ones.

"I drank a little then"—he doesn't now at all—"and I was trying to get drunk a lot. Mama would sit on the porch crying, saying, "I wish he'd walk through that door." I knew it was going to be the death of her."

The mother who "thought she had raised two ideal boys," as Thomas says now, would live another 12 years, though, get her driver's license, drive a truck Thomas helped her buy, keep cooking and going to church and cleaning houses. But she did die young, in her sleep on April 30, 1977. She was 65.

"I remember Mama crying, but we never talked about it," Thomas says. "Maybe the two of us should have talked."

Instead, Thomas went out into the world with his sweetheart from Roxie by his side, became a command sergeant major, spent 30 years in the U.S. Army, went to Korea, Vietnam, was respected, successful, a good father, then a counselor of troubled kids as a civilian—all far from the state where his brother was simply plucked off the map, no one seeming to care.

"I had a great Army career; I did it all," he says.

Along the way, Thomas picked up two bachelor's degrees, one in social science and another in social work. On his second degree, he had "Charles Eddie Moore" inscribed on it instead of his own name.

"I dedicated it to him," Thomas says as the cicadas sing.

'A STORY NEVER TOLD'
The truth is, a few people did care about the murders of Henry Dee and Charles Moore—and tried to get justice for their deaths.

"Dee-Moore was a major case for the FBI," says Bill Williams, who was an FBI agent brought to Natchez in 1964 to help deal with the growing rifts between the KKK—or "Kluckers," as the FBI called them—and the civil rights workers starting to show up in greater numbers. "The case was barely open when I got there."

"Natchez had actually become a focal point for racial, anti-civil rights activity for the state and would be for several years," says Williams by phone from Oregon, where he is now retired and talks to student groups about the history of the KKK in America. "Our main focus was to stop the violence."

Williams remembers "huge activity" in Franklin County, and calls the race wars in the area "a story never told." Along with FBI agent and Natchez native Clarence Prospere, Williams worked for several years to try to keep Natchez from exploding into an all-out race war. He remembers Police Chief J.T. Robinson putting the city under martial law for two weeks to try to keep the peace. "That little experience took a lot out of us," he says now.

At any given time then, there were upward of 100 FBI agents in and around Natchez, Williams says. A good number of them were trying to crack the Dee-Moore case, even as national media crowded into Neshoba due to the disappearance of the three civil rights workers, two of them white. "Dahmer and Neshoba County cases got the headlines."
(Vernon Dahmer was the Hattiesburg businessman killed by the Klan in 1966 for his civil rights work.)

The FBI investigation of the Dee-Moore case yielded more than 1,000 pages of files, including informant accounts. About a month after the men's torsos were found in the river, a Klan informant started filling the FBI in on what happened that night; they then searched the Mississippi River again working with U.S. Navy divers in the vicinity of Davis Island. A Nov. 3, 1964, FBI memorandum reported: "On 10/31/64, a skull, some bones, two shirts and large pieces of metal were found in the same area by Navy divers." Then on Nov. 2, divers recovered a Jeep engine block and two small steel wheels tied together with a chain.

"The chain on the engine block and the chain on the other items each had a loop sufficiently large enough to go around a body," Agent R. H. Jevons wrote.

The FBI then turned over what seemed to be a wealth of evidence to then-District Attorney Lenox Forman in Natchez, who promised to put it before the grand jury. On Nov. 6, the FBI and local authorities arrested James Ford Seale, 29, and Charles Marcus Edwards, 31, both of Meadville, for "willfully, unlawfully, feloniously and with malice aforethought killing the two Negroes on or about May 2, 1964," as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote in a letter to Bill Moyers, then special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson, the same day.

Both men confessed to the crime, according to the FBI, with Edwards admitting that he had been to Klan meetings. Another informant told the FBI that Seale and his wife ran a "Rod and Gun Club" in Natchez in Meadville that was a front for the KKK.

"The arrests of Edwards and Seale resulted from extensive FBI investigation," Hoover concluded. "This is another example of the FBI's close cooperation with Mississippi authorities in bringing to justice individuals responsible for racial violence in Mississippi." The two men were released on a $5,000 bond each, with a hearing set for Jan. 11, 1965.

Hoover's declaration of justice was premature, however. A Jan. 12, 1965, FBI memo stated that the D.A. had discussed the case with Franklin County Sheriff Wayne Hutto, Assistant Attorney General Garland Lyle, and Mississippi Highway Patrol Investigators Charles Snodgrass and Gwyn Cole, and had then decided to drop the charges against Seale and Edwards.

Forman said that the case was "greatly prejudiced" toward the defendants because they "put out the story" in Meadville that, after their arrest, they had been "brutally mistreated" and denied medication by the Mississippi State Highway Patrol. Forman called the stories "dilatory tactics," but believed that such accusations would cause the charges to be dismissed at the initial hearing. He said that if more evidence were developed, he would present the case to the grand jury later, possibly as soon as August 1965.

That never happened. Edwards, Seale and other Klansmen continued living their lives in the Natchez area, many to their deaths. Some, however, are still alive.

'I WANT JUSTICE, TOO'
Thomas Moore did not spend the last 41 years looking for justice. He followed Mazie's suggestion and didn't stir up trouble for more than 30 years.

His campaign began in December 1998 after he heard that James Byrd had been dragged to his death in Jasper, Texas. From Colorado, he wrote a letter to District Attorney Ronnie Harper asking him to look into his brother's murder. He agreed. Media around the country, including Newsday, "20-20" and Jerry Mitchell of The Clarion-Ledger, began to poke around the case again. In particular, Mitchell's Jan. 14, 2000, report that the murders occurred on federal land spurred the FBI to take a fresh look. "I'm just thrilled to death. I'm going home to tell my son," Thomas told Mitchell then.

But, again, justice was delayed. Despite a small spate of media reports, the case again languished, taking a backseat to more high-profile cases such as the Neshoba murders. Talking to the media at the Killen trial last month, Rita Schwerner Bender, the wife of Klan victim Michael Schwerner, pointed out that the bodies of two black men were found in the Mississippi River during the search for her husband in 1964—but it attracted little attention, and still doesn't. "You're here, you're interested in this trial as the most important trial of the Civil Rights Movement because two of the men are white," she said outside the courthouse. "You're still doing what was done in 1964."

When Thomas came back this month, he was in for a surprise. He had read media reports, and been told directly by reporters, that only one of the primary suspects in the murders was still alive: Charles Marcus Edwards. But while in Natchez, we learned—he from community people and from D.A. Harper; the JFP team from a former Klansman we interviewed—that the other primary suspect, James Ford Seale, is also still alive and lives in Roxie, near the intersection of Highways of 84/98 and 33 in a Winnebago-type trailer on land believed to belong to his brother.

This came as a shock to Moore when he confirmed the news on July 9, albeit a welcome shock. "When we left Colorado," he said this week in the JFP offices, "we had a plan as to what we wanted to do. But when we entered Franklin County and found out that James Ford Seale was still alive, it sprang out like a tree. It gave me more energy to go out in the community and talk to people."

And talk he did. We watched Thomas tell his brother's story to anyone who would listen: a white forest ranger at Homochitto National Forest; workers at bars where we recapped long days of reporting; friends and family he hadn't seen in years; strangers on the street black and white; and the audience of the Charles Evers radio show, as our crew all crammed into the tiny studio in West Jackson in between visits to Franklin County.

"Everything I've touched, everyone I've talked to, has given me encouragement," Thomas said.

One of the more touching exchanges took place on a porch on Maple Street, near downtown Natchez on a humid Sunday afternoon.

TIMING JUST RIGHT
To get to the home of Henry Hezekiah Dee's big sister, you go north on Canal Street from downtown, drive past the Natchez Democrat office, turn right on Madison, make a quick left on Maple. Mrs. Mary Byrd, who was 25 when her brother was killed, lives down the street a piece under a huge Magnolia tree. We gather on her front porch for her first meeting with the brother of Charles Moore.

Mrs. Byrd, a delicate woman of 63 with bright red fingernails, seems rather surprised at the sudden attention to her brother's case; in the 41 years since the murders, she has never been approached by the media or an investigator or a civil rights leader, other than some attorney in Georgia she remembers wanting her to travel over there years back to talk about it. She couldn't afford it.

As Thomas describes what he remembers about her little brother—that he was very dapper dresser with dark, smooth skin, hair processed straight and "tied back like a woman's" when it needed a re-conk—Mrs. Byrd nods and smiles a lot. When Thomas mentions that a lot of white people, then, didn't want justice in the case, she responds, "That's the way they are, some of them."

Mrs. Byrd says she is happy that something might finally be done about the case. "It's better for it to come on out. Better to come out, than stay in." She says she had followed the Killen trial in the newspapers. "That man was in that wheelchair," she says, "but they carried him on up in there," she says as her neighbors gather on their porches, watching to see what is up on Mrs. Byrd's porch.

Henry Dee's sister shrugs when she is asked why she thinks no one—including the daily newspaper two-tenths of a mile from her front door—has ever tried to talk to her about her brother's death. "They don't never say nothing," she says. "It makes you feel bad. They never, never say nothing. They're right down there (she pointed); you can see the back side of the building; the front is on Canal. They ain't said a word."

Actually, the daily newspaper has mentioned the case over the years, but sparingly and with little detail. Looking through bound stacks of old papers in their archive room, we examine the editorial space on the day after the FBI announced it was re-opening the case in 2000. The column was entitled, "Start off your day with good thoughts," and said nothing about the case.

However, thanks to Thomas Moore's efforts, that is changing. The paper got wind of his visit and ran a long front-page story about him last Sunday, July 17, accompanied by a powerful editorial: "But the timing may be just right now to find convictions, especially in the Dee and Moore case. "Communities have changed in the years since those tragic deaths. People who might once have been afraid to come forward with information may be longing to find justice, too. We urge anyone who might have more information to come forward now. Time is running out."

THE SHADOW OF DEATH
Probably the best news Thomas heard during his trip home came while he was sitting in U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton's office in Jackson. After Thomas and filmmaker David Ridgen, who also documented Thomas' journey, called Lampton to inquire about the status of the case, he got on the phone to the FBI headquarters in Washington. By the time Thomas arrived at his office on Wednesday, July 13, he had great news.

Lampton told Thomas he would lead an effort to re-investigate the case, as well as that of 37-year-old Wharlest Jackson, killed by a bomb in Natchez after being promoted into a "whites-only" job. He said the case still had federal jurisdiction even though the men did not die in the forest, being that the Klansmen started the job there.

"He told me that when this big trial (Oliver Diaz bribery trial) ended, he would form this team of the agencies involved. He wants to satisfy me, and he wants to satisfy himself that if there is anything he can do, he would do it," Thomas says in the 930 Blues Café, later that night after leaving the Evers show. "I believe the man. I believe him."

It doesn't hurt that it turned out that Lampton and Thomas were members of the same U.S. Army unit, the 1st Brigade, 4th Infantry, when they were training to go to the Persian Gulf. Lampton was a colonel. "He respected my rank as a command sergeant major," Thomas says. "He knows the authority and power my commission invested in me. It's kind of like old soldiers taking care of each other. He's a fine gentleman."

Bolstered by Lampton's pledge, Thomas decides to return to Franklin County to leave his mark before boarding a plane back home to Colorado Springs on July 17. Sunday morning, he shows up at Roxie First Baptist Church dressed in a new gray suit to talk to his people. Before the service, he tells Rev. Carl Johnson that he called one of the main suspects and left a message on his voicemail:I jus "t want you to be able to tell me face to face, man to man, on neutral ground, how and why your name is listed all over these reports."

(Reached at his home, Edwards refused to talk to the Jackson Free Press.)

Rev. Johnson introduces Thomas to the congregation as light peeks in through blue, pink and yellow stained-glass windows. "I saw the heaviness on his own heart as he came and talked with me on the outside before the service. And I want him to feel the relief we feel and how we get relief through the grace of God," Johnson says.

Thomas steps up: "Now, you may ask, 'well, why are you doing it now? Why are you coming back to seek justice?'" he says. "I served this country for 30 years and 15 days. ... I have the right to be here. Because I am going to hold Franklin County and the state of Mississippi accountable for the deaths of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Dee. And I have no fear. Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. I have no fear."

"Amen!" "Amen, brother!" "Amen."

Thomas calls for the community to rise up with him, to do what the Philadelphia Coalition did: "If they can do it in Neshoba County, they can do it here."

After the service, Thomas and several men—including his nephew Michael Webster, Finnis Weathersby and Mac Littleton—take two signs and erect them on the side of the road in front of Seale's and Edwards' homes. After they pound the first—"In Memory of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore ... Rest In Peace and JUSTICE"—into the ground in front of Seale's house, the men put their hands on top of each other's, huddle style, and Webster says a prayer.

Thomas Moore then talks directly to his brother: "I spoke at the church you were baptized in. It kind of brings it all together. Rest in peace, my brother. I will fight for justice until the day I die. I want you to know that, OK?"

In front of Edwards' house on Rand Lane S.W. near Meadville, Thomas speaks to Charles once again: "Rest in peace, brother. We'll see you on the higher ground."

Photos by Kate Medley. Additional reporting by Natalie Irby and Thabi Moyo.


Links to the JFP's slate of stories about the Dee-Moore murders:
July 20, 2005 - I Want Justice, Too
July 27, 2005 - A Dream Deferred
Oct. 26, 2005 - Editor's Note: Damned If We Don't
Oct. 26, 2005 Evolution of a Man
Oct. 26, 2005 - Dear Meadville: Thomas Moore Tries to Wake Up His Hometown
Oct. 26, 2005 - Daddy, Get Up
Oct. 27, 2005 - Franklin County Advocate Editorial and Thomas Moore Response
Dec. 7, 2005 - Just Rewards

Also: Read the JFP team's coverage of and blog about the Edgar Ray Killen trial here. The JFP's JusticeBlog (an archive of civil-rights-related coverage) is available here.


Photos, from top:

  1. Family photo of Charles Moore.
  2. Family photo of Charles and Thomas Moore, standing in front of Thomas' first car he got while working in New Orleans right after high school. He brought it home and let a friend drive it, who blew out the engine. He now wishes he had figured how to get it fixed and let his brother drive it while he was at Army training; if so, perhaps Charles wouldn't have been hitchhiking on May 2, 1964.
  3. The crumbling tombstone of Charles Moore.
  4. Klansmen beat Charles Moore and Henry Dee nearly to death in Homochitto National Forest, then drove them to the Mississippi River and sank their bodies while they were still breathing.
  5. Thomas Moore prays at Roxie First Baptist Church on Sunday, July 17, before asking the congregation to join his quest for justice.
  6. Thomas Moore (left) joined Charles Evers in his radio studio Wednesday, July 13, to call for justice for his brother's death.
  7. Mrs. Mary Byrd, Henry Dee's older sister, had never been approached by the media. She lives near downtown Natchez, two-tenths of a mile from the daily newspaper office.
  8. Thomas Moore and several men from First Roxie, including his nephew Michael Webster, erect a sign in front of where suspect James Ford Seale is believed to live. They pray once the sign is erected.

The Jackson Free Press got involved with the Charles Moore/Henry Dee case weeks before the Edgar Ray Killen trial, after David Ridgen, a documentarian for Canadian Broadcasting Corp., asked how we were covering the Killen trial. We both wanted to look at cases that had not been prosecuted, and Ridgen had been researching and coordinating documentary production for the CBC on the Dee/Moore case since August 2004. We agreed to work together to investigate the story and follow Thomas Moore's journey for justice. The JFP started researching this case during the Edgar Ray Killen trial and, subsequently, joined David and Thomas Moore in Meadville starting on July 8 to report on Thomas' visit to the Meadville-Natchez area and to Jackson, as well as do independent reporting in the area. Thomas left Mississippi to return to Colorado Springs on July 18. David's documentary will air on CBC in the near future.

JFP Reporting Team on the Dee-Moore case:

JFP editor Donna Ladd led our team that followed Thomas Moore on his quest for justice, and wrote the cover story this issue. The Neshoba County native graduated from Mississippi State and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

Kate Medley is a Jackson native who graduated from the University of Montana. She worked as a photojournalist for two years before recently beginning a Master's in Southern Studies at Ole Miss. She photographed the cover and cover story.

Jackson native Natalie Irby is a graduate of Jackson Prep and Ole Miss. She is a researcher and writer on civil rights issues and helped report the case of Henry Dee and Charles Moore this issue. She now divides her time between Nashville and Jackson.

Photo intern Thabi Moyo graduated from Howard University in 2004. She is an aspiring filmmaker and lives in Madison. She grew up in Jackson. As part of the Dee-Moore reporting team, Thabi taped interviews about the case for CBC television.

Special thanks to David Ridgen of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. who helped faciliate Thomas Moore's visit back to Mississippi, driving with him from Colorado Springs to Mississippi to document his journey. We salute him for helping a diverse group of native Mississippians tell our own stories.

(Originally published July 20, 2005; this story was originally posted at 9 a.m. on July 20, 2005, but moved to the top of the Web site on Jan. 24, 2007, after it was announced that the feds had charged James Ford Seale. Any use of material from this story must be directly attributed to the Jackson Free Press.)

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